Athena (spacecraft)


Athena is a proposed space mission that would perform a single flyby of asteroid 2 Pallas, the third largest asteroid in the Solar System.
If Athena is funded, it would share the launch vehicle with the Psyche spacecraft and fly its own trajectory for a Mars gravity assist to slingshot into the asteroid belt. It would take about two years to reach Pallas. The mission's Principal Investigator is Joseph O'Rourke, at Arizona State University.

Objectives

The science goals and objectives include:
Athena would conduct visible imaging of the geology of Pallas with a miniature color camera. Also, a radio science experiment would use continuous antenna pointing to Earth for two-way Doppler tracking to enable the determination of the mass of Pallas with a precision of <0.05%.